Time-lapse Images of Glacier Loss

Professional photographer and naturalist James Balog is director of the Extreme Ice Survey and the first recipient of the International League of Conservation Photographers Award. Here, he gives a TED talk to illustrate global warming with time-lapse images of glacial ice-loss.

Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969, a Spark for Environmentalism

On June 22, 1969, an oil slick and assorted debris caught fire under a railroad trestle on the Cuyahoga River. It was a relatively quick fire, having only burned for 30 minutes. The occurrence was barely covered in the local Cleveland newspapers, and did not receive much attention until a month later, when Time Magazine made it a national issue.

What most people don’t know is that the fire was one of a dozen similar incidents when oil and chemical-soaked debris ignited on the Cuyahoga. And it didn’t happen only in Cleveland – rivers flowing through urban centers often served as sewers for industrial waste.

40 years later, the Cuyahoga fire remains a powerful symbol of an industrialized planet in peril and our impending environmental crises. The event had such a great impact that many credit it as being a catalyst for Congress to pass the Clean Water Act in 1972, and for the creation of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

In recognition of the four decades of progress since the fire, 2009 has been dubbed “The Year of the River” in Cleveland. This year is a celebration of the progress made in cleaning local waterways, and to recognize that additional efforts are still needed to further clean and maintain these natural resources.

Also commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Cuyohoga River fire, Positively Cleveland is has compiled a nice list of the 75 “green” things we love about Cleveland.

Additional Articles and Videos on the Cuyahoga River fire:

• Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization
• Positively Cleveland – 75 Green Things We Love About Cleveland
• VIDEO: Retired Congressman Louis Stokes talks about his theory for pursuing clean water laws: If we could clean up the Cuyahoga River, we could clean up any body of water in the nation.
• VIDEO: Ben Stefanski II remembers standing at the river with Mayor Carl Stokes the day after the fire, declaring war on water pollution.
• VIDEO: Frank Samsel, retired owner of Samsel Supply Co., wasn’t surprised the river caught fire. He recalls regularly sucking up fats from rendering plants along with fuel and chemical spills.

What Deformed Frogs Say About Our Drinking Water

On Sunday, April 5th of this year, Thirteen/WNET’s Nature Series premiered Frogs: The Thin Green Line. Emmy award winning filmmaker, Allison Argo, blended poetic cinematography with masterful soundscapes in a disarmingly straightforward masterpiece delineating the relationship between sewage water and the growing number of frogs being born with defects.

“It’s uncomfortable to realize that we are part of the problem,” Argo explained to me in a phone interview on the topic, but “It’s also exciting and stimulating to realize that we are part of the solution.” Argo’s ability to maintain an optimistic perspective on this bleak situation is grounded, in part, by the day-to-day lifestyle adjustments she makes. She switched to public transportation for her travels between her Cape Cod studio and Boston, she has been swapping old light bulbs for more energy efficient ones, and she is building a frog pond in her yard this summer.

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Save the Water!

Summertime is upon us. Between some relaxing, enjoying the pool, going to farmer’s markets and all the other activities that go with warm weather, you can bet a good number of us will be spending some time hunched over our gardens and lawns.

Americans love gardening and landscaping. It’s like playing in a grown-up sandbox. In 2006, we spent more than $27 billion dollars on professional landscaping and do-it-yourself projects. Granted, this was before the onset of the current recession, but here we see yet another convergence where being lean and green makes all too much sense.

Have you noticed “Save the Water” or “Use Only What You Need” campaigns in your hometown? Have you thought, “wait a minute — since when did we have a water problem?” To use Denver as an example, the combination of the unpredictable effects of global warming together with shifting populations and seasonal variability means that even a traditionally robust water supply can quickly come under threat. When as much as 30 percent of American’s outdoor water usage streams into our lawns, that means a lot of water and money keeping grass green. Useonlywhatyouneed.org claims a staggering 55 percent of our water usage is on outdoor watering.

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Organic Lawncare: Safer, Cheaper, Easier than Chemical

On May 10, 2002 PBS’ “Now with Bill Moyers” ran a report which asked the provocative question “Are We Poisoning Our Children.” While the short answer to question appeared to be “yes,” the details were nonetheless startling. “In my lifetime 75,000 synthetic chemicals and metals have been put to use in America,” Moyers declared, “Chemicals, that, in many cases make our lives easier and better. They kill insects and weeds, clean our clothes and carpets, unclog our drains, create and produce lawns, pretty as a picture.”

An increase in the incidence of childhood cancers was the first trigger for the investigation, which discovered children with home and garden pesticides in their urine, lactating women with termite poison and flame retardants in their breast milk and in Bill Moyer’s personal blood test a veritable witch’s brew including the long banned pesticide DDT, as well as dioxin, PCBs, organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides, ad nauseum.

When the Moyer’s reports ran in 2002 I had, perhaps naively, expected the start of a grassroots movement aimed at reducing our and, more importantly, our children’s exposures to chemicals at least in those areas where individuals could make choices, such as whether or not we would put chemicals on the lawns our children played upon.

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Cap and Trade Bill Presents Dilemma for Environmental Movement

There is an old saying that there are two things you never want to watch being made. The first is hot dogs. The second is legislation.

Considering that the legislative twists and turns taken by the first cap and trade bill dealing with carbon dioxide with a legitimate chance of passage, twists that have caused Greenpeace and the American Petroleum Institute to be on the same side of an environmental issue and not in a good way, that saying appears more than ever to be a truism.

On Thursday May 21st the House Energy and Commerce Committee, by a 33-25 vote passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, also known as the Markey-Waxman bill, and sent it on to the full House. By the time it had left committee the bill was 946 pages long and already contained over 100 amendments, an indication that a Republican strategy predicted by Grist reporter, Kate Sheppard on May 18th (Republicans plan to offer hundreds of amendments to slow climate bill), had been at least partially successful.

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Rainforests in Borneo At-Risk

A photojournalist covering Borneo calls the island “one of the most tragic ecological disasters in history.”